Volta ao dia… (Back to the day…)

Ana and Margrit, two women that don’t know each other, meet in an apartment in which they had never been. From this point – and the inspiration in Julio Cortázar’s texts – kicks off the play Volta Ao Dia… (Back to the Day…)

“When you are not very sure about anything,

The best is to create duties for yourself, as floats.”

One day I read this sentence in the tale “The Persecutor”, which is a libertarian tribute that Cortázar made to the Jazz bird Charlie Parker, and I thought I should insist reading his work. It was 1999, and it was not at all hard. I was just performing “Adeus, Robinson” (Good bye, Robinson!) a radio text of Julio Cortázar himself. The opportunity for the montage was a stimulus and since then, almost daily, I live with the crooked, free and frighteningly real imaginary of his texts.

For a long time the “absolute certainties”, strong indicators of ignorance, power, moralism, desperate religiosities, prejudice and disaffection no longer seduce me. The daily encounter with the doubt of the now, the imminent uncertainty and the one after it, have been the motive of reflection and reading of every day.

There are days in which the subject wakes up and think: “I got until here. From here I don’t pass.” Doubt can be a factor of paralysis, sleep, illness and death, but with a great dose of risk, maybe it is the propulsion factor, what generates movement, shows inquietude, tones the body muscles.

Nothing out of the ordinary, each one with one’s “little life”, from there to here, trying to put the head outside and breathe a fresher air, we were able to gather around the table to read and inspire ourselves. Each day of the work process determined what the next day would be like, and so it went on. We got a ride with Julio Cortázar and, as the “Autonautas da Cosmopista”, we followed a trip with several stops. We gave innumerous turns around ourselves, our room, our house, the other in front of us, and so on like in a spiral. We talked about trips, about the tireless search of one-self, of freedom, only this, every day.